Viral Theatres
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Viral Theatres documents the emergence of new digital theatre realities during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a practice research project, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation, at the Excellence Cluster EXC2020 Temporal Communities that ran from 2021-2022.
Viral theatres ran three research residencies at Deutsches Theater, the Berliner Ensemble and Komische Oper and the HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer theatre in Berlin, conducted a series of interviews with theatre makers and brought together researchers and artists from around the world in symposia and workshops. The Viral Theatres team of researchers and artists also created their own digital performance experiment with live social VR.
Their documents on working with and experiencing digital performance during the pandemic were shown in a final exhibition in Berlin and Düsseldorf.
Viral Theatres was also the starting point for our OSUN Performance and Digital Culture teaching initiative.
EXHIBITION
This exhibition showcases the work of the artistic research project Viral Theatres that creatively documents how theatre closures and the pandemic migration into the digital sphere lastingly affect theatrical work processes.
SYMPOSIUM
Viral Theatres brought together its research findings in a symposium with international artists and researchers at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin in April 2022
VR PERFORMANCE
Marionette Theatre 3.0 was a site-specific VR experiment with Heinrich v. Kleist’s text on marionette theatre. In it, an Avatar invited the audience to a virtual dance.
WORKSHOP
We explored the nature of digital liveness in a lab context combining Zoom workshop discussion sessions with practical lab work.
THE TEAM
Viral Theatres consisted of a team of interdisciplinary researchers and independent artists who collaborated on thinking through and experimenting with the pandemic developments in digital performance
PUBLICATIONS
Special Issue “Hybrid Futures” in International Journal for Performance Arts and Digital Media
“Viral Theatres’ Pandemic Playbook: Documenting German Theatre During COVID-19” in International Journal for Performance Arts and Digital Media,
“Theater und Digitalität” in Theater und Tanz – Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium
“Auf der Suche nach dem Publikum. Zuschauerräume in der Pandemie” in #Corona Theater
The Viral Theatres Research Project is a collaboration of the EXC2020 Temporal Communities at the Freie Universität Berlin, the EXC Matters of Activityas well as Gamelab.berlin at Humboldt University Berlin & Bard College Berlin; the research project was generously funded by the VolkswagenFoundation. We also cooperated with the following partners for its final exhibition and symposium: Nachtkritik.de, metalab@Harvard & FU Berlin.
